The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
by David Kertzer
List Price: $15.00
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0679768173
Publisher: Vintage
Since 1992 David Kertzer has been the Paul Dupee, Jr. University
Professor of Social Science at Brown University, where he is also Professor
of anthropology and history. He had previously been the William Kenan
Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College, and has been a visiting
faculty member at the Universities of Catania and Bologna in Italy, at
Trinity College, Cambridge, England, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Kertzer's work falls at the
intersection of anthropology and history, and he is an expert on the rise
of modern family life in the West. His recent book, Sacrificed for
Honor (Beacon Press, 1993), exposed the massive abandonment of newborn
babies that took place in much of Europe up through the nineteenth century.
He has also been at the forefront of a scholarly movement that highlights
the central role played by symbols, myths, and ritual in politics. His
book, Ritual, Politics, and Power (Yale University Press, 1988,
translated into Italian and Chinese) has drawn a great deal of attention
and provoked international debate. More recently, he has examined the
difficulties faced by western communist parties in trying to redefine
themselves as noncommunist (Politics and Symbols, Yale University
Press, 1996).
Kertzer has also written opinion
pieces for many newspapers--such as The Washington Post, The
Christian Science Monitor, and The Baltimore Sun--on how to
interpret politics through symbolism, and he has appeared on national
television news and radio shows to discuss this topic. His popular journalism
includes a cover story that appeared in TV Guide: an anthropologist's
view of the Super Bowl. In February 1998, his piece on Church responsibility
for anti-Semitism appeared on The New York Times op ed page.
Kertzer is the recipient of
many honors: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities
fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, various National Science Foundation
and National Institutes for Health research awards, and a fellowship year
at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences, Stanford. The
Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (published in hardcover by Knopf, paperback
issued in July 1998 by Vintage, and also published so far in Italy, France,
Germany, Britain, and Brazil, with an Israeli edition in press) was a
finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and won a Jewish
National Book Award for 1997. Two of his other books have been awarded
prizes as the best books of the year in Italian history, and he is the
founding editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.
As movingly discussed in the
afterword to The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Kertzer's interest
in the largely forgotten drama of the little Jewish boy seized on the
order of the Inquisitor was sparked not only by his scholarly interests,
but by his family background as well. His father, Jewish chaplain with
the American armed forces that liberated Rome, presided over the first
service held at Rome's synagogue in the days after Liberation in 1944.
Both film rights and stage
rights to The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara have recently been
sold. Alfred Uhry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Driving Miss Daisy
and other plays and screenplays, is currently preparing the stage version.
David Kertzer lives in Providence,
RI, with his wife, Susan, and is father of Molly, age 24, and Seth, 22.
He is currently working on another book for Knopf, on the Popes and the
Jews. In connection with that project, he became, in the summer of 1998,
one of the first scholars not connected with the Vatican to be admitted
to the previously closed archives of the Inquisition in Rome.
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